Growing up we had a white German Shepherd. She was huge, like 100+ pounds, more than 5 feet tall when she stood on her hind legs. On Christmas, right before heading to my aunts for dinner, she grabbed an entire spiral ham off the counter and ate the whole thing. No main course for the rest of us.

The most powerful people in this country right now reject it, but most people accept it. So even as we might argue with Wood on lots of specifics here, there’s widespread agreement on the idea of a creedal nation, specifically one grounded in the language and values of the Declaration.

I find it really important in this conversation that a hubris majority of Americans find this argument really compelling. They reject blood and soil nationalism and gravitate towards a framing of American-ness based around the Declaration. www.nationhoodlab.org/nationhood-l...

…it’s possible I did more research on this than I remember the last time I looked into it.

I still feel like I really don’t know anything here, but isn’t this all connected to the Victims of Communism Museum/Foundation? Created by GOP law in 1993.

It started coming up in my various 250th anniversary legislative alerts a couple years ago and piqued my interest. Mostly they say “students should learn evils of communism, how many people these specific regimes (and only them!) killed, blurs communism/nazis, and proposes an absurd reading list.

Is it identical to the dozens of state level communist education bills that have been introduced over the past few years?

Not sure how I missed this one earlier in the month when it came out!

Cassius Marcellus Clay in 1857, to criticisms that he was too radical an abolitionist: “I am so far an abolitionist as certain men named George Washington and…some other such ’lunatics’ who got together in 1776 and enunciated some very ‘mad and incendiary’ doctrines.”

I should get in touch with him—we’re only 6 years from the George Washington tricentennial!

Just incredible rhetoric. Some abolitionists would have been SUCH good posters.

Don’t tell me “Constitution 250” is already gaining steam, I can’t handle it.

Ok the new exhibit had some of the coolest interactives I’ve ever seen. Just a really cool way to make a mostly two dimensional collection come alive.

If “worried, frustrated, inspired, connected to others” isn’t a perfect distillation of what it’s like to do public history work right now, I don’t know what is.